Revisiting the operating principles and application of interferometers

Interferometer is a device, which splits light waves into two components. The two beams travel in different paths and recombine after some relative propagation phase delay. Among the most commercial interferometers in the optical industries are Michelson, Fabry-Perot and Mach-Zehnder. In this paper, the basic operating principles and application fields of each type of interferometer are reviewed. The optical designs were conducted by running a simulation on a commercial optical software package, ASAP.